By Alex Treat & Kristen Vosberg
If you’ve attended a university (Why are you here if you haven’t, and have you considered getting a degree in WRD at DePaul?), then you’ve encountered a writing center. You walk in with a paper or schedule an appointment, you meet with a student tutor, and hopefully you walk out a better writer as per the moto of writing centers everywhere “Our purpose is not to make better writing, but make better writers.”
But even when sharing services and core philosophies, writing centers vary from university in a plethora of elements – work culture, hiring processes, etc. You’ll most likely find these differences at their starkest between smaller and larger universities. A smaller university writing center, with a naturally smaller number of tutors, will not operate the same way larger university’s will, like DePaul’s UCWbL with its near 100 writing tutors. Some writing centers even differentiate between job titles, such as writing consultant versus writing tutor.
WRD graduate assistant Alex Treat was a writing consultant for three years at his undergraduate school, the University of Arkansas at Monticello, an experience that vastly differed from Kristen Vosberg’s time spent as a DePaul writing tutor. And her experience differs from UCWbL graduate assistant and current writing tutor Kate Fabsik. We got together and compared notes on our experiences, talking through work culture, lingo, how we interacted with students, and the general contrast found in our university populations.
Training
We opened up talking about how we got into the writing centers and how each office hired and trained tutors. As opposed to DePaul’s larger operation, UAM’s was a little less defined.
“It really depended on what the English department was needing – because we were very much under the English department. Typically, the recruitment tool was a writing center internship that you took for a semester and that would be the way that our boss would usually select people to hire and stuff, or get people to apply. Especially because he was only limited to a certain number of people that he could hire due to budget constraints, he was able to select people he already had an idea of.”
“But it didn’t always work out that way. Or even half the time. Chaotically, the English Department would ask that we hire more tutors because they were wanting to Institute this new program or something, like embedded tutoring. People hired outside the internship usually received less formal training, generally through a lengthy meeting at the beginning of the semester.”
The DePaul UCWbL has a much more streamlined process for immersing you into its operation.
“Basically,” said Kate, “you do your interview. You’re hired. For next Fall Quarter, one of your classes is going to have to be WRD 395 Writing Pedagogies. I don’t know of situations where that has not happened. You accept that. You take the class for theory, you get to practice some tutoring processes in the class and reflect on them, and you start working hours immediately, but you only work five hours, I think. At work you can do homework before you’re opened up. You also shadow people, right? You see what they’re doing and reflect on that experience with admins or senior tutors. Someone joins your first appointment. That’s how I’ve done it. It’s usually pretty chill. That is all within the span of your first class at DePaul. You go from learning theory, practicing theory with someone else, practicing it on your own, and then you were considered pretty much a fully fledged tutor from that point on, you may still be learning specifics, but that’s the training.”
Socialization
The UCWbL also has a massive amount of tutors in comparison to the handful of UAM’s.
“When there’s only like eight, nine, ten of you in the writing center,” said Alex, “you tend to form a closer culture with each other. More persona.l I know that the DePaul writing center has, what, a hundred tutors, something like that?”
“90,” said Kristen. “90 something staff.”
“In our writing center, I knew what everyone was doing and who everyone was, even as people graduate and the new people came in. I knew everyone by name. We oddly have a sort of afterlife for our writing through Discord, our main communication infrastructure. And it’s been kind of accumulating over the years.”
“There’s some aspect of that as the UCWbL. “Some people are still on Slack. When we were in person, if they still live in the city, they would still drop by sometimes. There is a sort of afterlife, but it was mostly dependent on being on campus.”
Opening Doors
Interestingly, we also found that our centers had varying pathways to opportunities for its tutors.
“We were very academically situated,” said Alex. “A lot of the students that were working in there, because we were also a smaller university, we also had more opportunities to go to conferences and get closer with our professors and stuff like that. When you got into the writing center, it was almost like you were opening up doors. Is that similar in DePaul’s writing center?”
“You can make it that way, for sure,” said Kristen. “I mean, you can gain positions. There’s head tutors, which I think comes with like a small pay raise and different responsibilities. There’s one that’s the head of Writing Fellows, and if we didn’t explain writing fellows already, it is this program that is part of the writing center where as a professor, if you teach a class, you can request a Writing Fellow and you get two fellows who come talk to your class about writing within the constructs of the assignment. Instead of just taking any appointment that comes in, they’re a part of this class; they get material from this class; they might send emails to the class, sign with the professor, have multiple meetings with the professor to tell them like, ‘Here’s what to look out for.’ A lot of times it’s like freshmen, sophomore year writing or history of liberal arts classes. And then you talk to your fellows about it. They maintain agency as is the case in all tutoring practices.”
We talked on about other subjects, such as what doors our writing centers opened for us or what our break rooms were like. Ultimately though, our writing centers were still united by the philosophical goal of not making better writing but better writers, a motto for writing centers everywhere.